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Monash biologist studies human evolution: teeth tell the story

Monash University-led
research has shown that the evolution of human teeth is much simpler
than previously thought, and that we can predict the sizes of teeth
missing from human fossils and those of our extinct close relatives
(hominins).

A new study published recently in the journal Nature, led by
evolutionary biologist Dr Alistair Evans from Monash University, took a
fresh look at the teeth of humans and fossil hominins. The research
confirms that molars, including wisdom teeth, do follow the sizes
predicted by what is called ‘the inhibitory cascade’—a rule that shows
how the size of one tooth affects the size of the tooth next to it. This
is important because it indicates that human evolution was a lot
simpler than scientists had previously thought.

Dr Alistair Evans examines a range of hominin skull casts that were included in the study. (Image: David Hocking)

Dr Alistair Evans explains how our fascination with where we come
from, and what our fossil ancestors were like, has fuelled our search
for new fossils and how we can interpret them.

“Teeth can tell us a lot about the lives of our ancestors, and how
they evolved over the last seven million years. What makes modern humans
different from our fossil relatives? Palaeontologists have worked for
decades to interpret these fossils, and looked for new ways to extract
more information from teeth,” Dr Evans said.

Dr Evans, a research associate at Museum Victoria, discussed how this
new research has challenged the accepted view that there was a lot of
variation in how teeth evolved in our closest relatives.

“Our new study shows that the pattern is a lot simpler than we first
thought—human evolution was much more limited,” Dr Evans said.

Dr Evans led an international team of anthropologists and
developmental biologists from Finland, USA, UK and Germany, using a new
extensive database on fossil hominins and modern humans collected over
several decades, as well as high resolution 3D imaging to see inside the
fossil teeth.

The team then took the research a step further by applying the
findings to two main groups of hominins: the species in the genus Homo (like us and Neanderthals), and australopiths, including specimens like Lucy, the famous fossil hominin from Africa.

Dr Evans explained that while it was discovered that both groups follow the inhibitory cascade, they do so slightly differently.

“There seems to be a key difference between the two groups of hominins, perhaps one of the things that defines our genus, Homo,” the Monash University biologist said.

“What’s really exciting is that we can then use this inhibitory
cascade rule to help us predict the size of missing fossil teeth.
Sometimes we find only a few teeth in a fossil. With our new insight, we
can reliably estimate how big the missing teeth were. The early hominin
Ardipithecus is a good example: the second milk molar has never been found, but we can now predict how big it was.”

Another author on the Nature paper was Professor Grant
Townsend from the University of Adelaide’s School of Dentistry. The
study examined teeth of modern humans, including those in one of the
world’s largest collections of dental casts housed at the Adelaide
Dental Hospital.

”These collections of dental casts are critical to finding our place
in the hominin evolutionary tree, and advancing knowledge in the oral
health of Australians,” said Professor Townsend.

The findings of the study will be very useful in interpreting new
hominin fossil finds, and looking at what the real drivers of human
evolution were. As well as shedding new light on our evolutionary past,
this simple rule provides clues about how we may evolve into the future.

Monash University School of Biological Sciences

Biological sciences is
the broad term given to all the areas of study that have biology as
their base subject. Biology is the study of life processes and living
organisms. It is concerned with microbes, plants and animals, and
involves study of their structure, function, evolution, development and
ecology.

The scale of study ranges from genetics, the study of genes and the
ways they control the development of plants and animals, including
humans, to ecology, an area of biology dealing with the relationships of
organisms to the environment and biosphere.

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